We will continue our quest into Storage Economics with a few questions about our environments. If you are a storage administrator, storage architect, storage capacity planner, host administrator, member of CIO’s office, CIO, Strategic Planning and Buying teams, this post is for you. Based on your environments, organizations and business units, I would suggest you send these questions to at least 3 different teams that are related to storage and have them answer these questions. To your surprise, you will see the disconnect people within various different teams have based on the roles they play.

oHow much storage did the CIO’s office purchase in 2008? Are the numbers in line?

oHow much forecast do we have for this current year 2009?

oWhen was the last time we purchased something because it’s a great toy to work and play with?

oWhat is the % of our Storage Allocated?

oWhat is the % of our Storage Utilization?

oWhat % of our Storage is virtualized?

oHow do we measure our Storage efficiency?

oHow often do we run Storage optimization exercises?

oHow many hosts are connected to our Storage Environment?

oDo we have a long term Storage Strategy in terms of growth, technology, direction, etc?

oHow many host systems do we migrate every week, month, quarter?

oWhen was the last time after a host migration or host retirement, our storage was reclaimed?

oDo we have a process around Storage Reclamation?

oIs our Storage Strategy in line with our overall priorities?

oIs our Storage being managed properly?

oIs our Storage in line with what our Consultants have advised in the past?

oWhen was the last time we had an Application Outage because of Storage?

oWhat was the penalty our division paid for a human mistake?

oWhat was the penalty our division paid for an application outage because of Storage mis-configurations?

oDo we use Tiering in our Storage environment?

oDo we enforce ILM in our Storage environment?

oHow much data based on Tiering do we have in our environment?

oHow many Luns are associated with a given host in our environment?

oWhat host has the most amount of Storage allocated?

oDo we replicate data for its criticalness?

oDo we replicate data for Compliance?

oWhen was the last time we verified our site to site replication is correctly working

oDo we have islands of storage or centralized storage?

oAre our BCV devices smaller than your source devices?

oAre our BCV devices larger than your source devices?oHow do we do chargeback’s to the groups that use Storage?

oWho paid for the last Storage hardware that was rolled into our datacenter? Who is actually using that Storage today?

oAre we looking to purchase new Storage this month or quarter?

oDo we need any independent help?

Experience

We manage some storage at a very large retail house. During a conference bridge meeting with the outsourcing partner of the customer who manages the entire Data center along with other storage islands, there was a basic question we asked the customer and the outsourcing partner, do you happen to know how many host systems are attached to this storage frame?

Answer comes back; it’s a development box, so we really don’t care. Upon further analyzing there storage environment over the next couple of days we found out that the customer had 82 host systems connected to this frame, primarily all classified as production data running on VMware and citrix infrastructure servers.

Would you like to know answers to all the questions above and develop an organization wide strategy about your Storage?

Virtualization

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Disclaimer

The opinions expressed here are my - StorageNerve opinions. This blog and the content published here is not read or approved in advance by my employer (Accenture) or clients and does not reflect their views and opinions.